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Santa Barbara Train Station
updated: Mar 26, 2011, 8:15 AM
By the dedicated staff
If you get off the train upon arriving in Santa Barbara, you'll be arriving at an historic train station, and steps away from the City's famous Moreton Bay Fig Tree.
The Amtrak station welcomes passengers from the Coast Starlight and Pacific Sunliner train lines serving Southern California. Schedules for Amtrak trains and ticketing can be found here here. Trains travel south to San Diego, and north to San Luis Obispo, but due to a current track construction project along the Gaviota Coast, a bus takes passengers heading north of Goleta.
The station, built in 1902, is constructed in Spanish Mission Revival style architecture, and those signature round arches you see along the building facing the incoming trains are repeated all over town.
There's usually not much activity at the station unless its close to an arrival or departure time, but walk a half block west, and you'll be on State Street, Santa Barbara's main thoroughfare, with the Pacific Ocean on your right, and downtown Santa Barbara on your left.
A convenient electric city trolley can take you anywhere along lower State Street for only a quarter.
If you walk east, away from State Street, you'll run into one of the biggest fig trees ever seen. Yes, Santa Barbara's Moreton Bay Fig Tree is documented as the largest Ficus macrophylla in the entire U.S.
This tree was planted in 1958 - an earlier tree planted on the site, which measured smaller than this one, died.
One day, Ed did some investigating into the history of the tree, and found out some cool facts. Read the whole story here.
A while back, many of the city's homeless population would sleep among the Fig Tree's notable above ground root structure, but that was ended many years ago. Now there are low fences with a chain around the tree, and no sleepers in sight when we visited last week.
Adjacent to the tree is an historic private railroad car, sitting on one of the spurs that were constructed in 1905, when wealthy travelers would come to Santa Barbara in style in their own private cars. Families like the Clarks would travel cross-country to winter in Santa Barbara's lovely winter weather.
There's no way quite like that to get here today, but the allure of the great climate and seaside city life remains just as strong. See our Visitor Guide to get ideas about what to do during your stay. Welcome!
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